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THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS
Delivered at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863
by President Abraham Lincoln.
At nightfall on November 18, 1863, a special train drew into the small
station at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and President Abraham Lincoln and his party alighted. They were greeted by Judge David Wills,
chairman of a committee supervising the dedication of a cemetery nearby, in which the bodies of most of the six thousand men killed in the
Civil War battle fought there the preceding July might rest. Few could have dreamed that the President's brief address the following day would be remembered as long as the battle itself.
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or
any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger
sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
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